Partners in Your Story

Tourism is so yesterday. . .

Traditional tourism is what we grew up with. You get on a plane, pile into a car and go somewhere. You take some pictures. You eat some new food. You go home.

I remember going through the pictures a friend took on a trip to an impoverished country. In the back ground of one of the pictures there was a broken down washing machine behind the cute little girl who was obviously the target of the picture. As I looked over the picture, I noticed something out of place, you could clearly see the wooden stock of a weathered AK-47 poking out! I called my friend over and asked him about this. He had not even realized what he had captured. He did not know. He had taken the picture without noticing what was really going on in the picture. I shudder about it to this day. What else had he missed. Where was he really. I mean, I know where he physically was but he had missed the context of where he truly was. He had not really experienced the trip because he had missed the human side of his trip.

Now, most people do not want to visit spots where soviet era weapons lounge with the laundry but I would argue that most of us would want to know the story behind the AK. I want to know the story behind the AK. I don’t want a trip, I want an adventure, an experience. IF you take the touristy type of trip as mentioned, you might see things but will you ever perceive them for what they really are?

All of our adventures start from the premise that a place is not as much the adventure as the people are. To truly experience a place you must experience the people. A location, no matter how spectacular, divorced from the people that did or do inhabit it, is truly void of its meaning. Sure, get to know the history but the importance of history, to a large degree, is only important in relation to the trajectory and current reality of those who live there. Our adventures will always be unappologetically about meeting and experiencing people and their current cultural reality in relation to their past.

I have been to Egypt, multiple times. The first was in the early 2000s with my new wife. We took a sail boat to a resort town and stayed for a week. We relaxed on the beach, took a couple of excursions and we thought we had really experienced Egypt. Boy were we wrong. Fast forward 5 years, now speaking the language, we looked through some of our old pictures. We now noticed signs like “Tourist village - Egyptians not allowed!” We returned and stayed in the heart of the old city in Cairo, walked and ate with the people; we became familiar with their stories in relation to the near and ancient history of Egypt. Now we can say we have truly been to Egypt.

This is the perspective that we want all our adventurers have: to truly experience and understand a place in relation to its people. As you meet people, you can begin to understand yourself and your adventure better, in context with the world you come from.